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Sunday, March 22, 2009

Adventures in FamilySearch Indexing: Week 77

It's been a while since I blogged. It's actually taken me a week to get over the BYU Computerized Family History Conference that I attended March 13th and 14th. I think it was because I attended the Saturday before it the South Davis Family History Conference. These all day events really wipe me out.

People have asked me if I learned anything new and my mind just draws a blank. It was great, loved both conferences. Learned a lot but I didn't hardly write anything down. It just adsorbed into my brain and is sitting nicely there to recover at some random time. But for the life of me I couldn't tell you what's sitting new in there. Usually I write down new thoughts onto paper to refer back to later. I noticed I didn't make many notes for these two conferences. I also think it doesn't help having fatigue after the meetings. It makes my brain go to mush.

I've also had another project I've been working on for a while now. Someone hired me to go through four huge volumes of family history work that they paid a genealogies to do for them and have me check if all the temple work is done or not. The goal is to do 20 hours of work a month. This past week I put in a lot of hours because earlier in the month I didn't do very much. Playing catch-up is never easy. I have to say the extra income will be nice but I prefer working on my own genealogy.

Now it's time to focus on FamilySearch Indexing. I received an email from FamilySearch Indexing this week that I am passing along to you.

Dear Volunteers:

We greatly appreciate your contributions to Cheshire projects that have been indexed in the past. FamilySearch indexing is now uniting volunteers who have previously worked on Cheshire projects to help complete the UK - Cheshire Parish Registers part 1 project by March 31st.

If you have any questions regarding this project or about indexing in general, please contact Indexing Support toll-free in the U.S. and Canada at

Thank you again for all of your efforts! We have seen great things accomplished when volunteers work together toward a common goal.

Warm Regards,

FamilySearch Indexing

I really don't think I did much of the Cheshire project. If I remember correctly I tried to work on a batch and it was all in Latin, so I sent it back. I know they need people to help but I'm not sure yet if I will attempt a batch again. I know that all the batches are not in Latin but I'm just not sure if I'm in the mood to work on it right now.

As usual I looked so see if we have any other messages from Headquarters and there is one in My Messages in the application.

If you need to change your stake, you must select an option from the list that appears when you begin typing in the Group or Stake field.

There must be something selected or typed in the Country and State or Province fields before you can save your updated information.

10. Click Save.

Thank you!

Now it's time to pick what batch I want to work on. I decided to take a look at the UK Cheshire Parish Records. I clicked on "View Sample" and nothing comes up. I see a quick flash of a download and then nothing. That option must not be working. I'm just not brave enough to tackle that project sight unseen.

My mood is more for census records. I picked the New Jersey 1920 US Federal Census. My first batch is blurred, it's like the page moved during scanning. I send it back, choosing the option "Send it back, and take it out of circulation". They really need to rescan it. I was advised to contact my group administrator and explain why it needed to be taken out of circulation. I think it's kind of late to call so I just sent them an email with the explanation and batch number.

Now for the next batch. Since I have batches right in the same series I have the same problem again - blurred images. I return two more batches. This time I keep the email up to my group administrator so I can just lump the batch numbers and explanation together. I get up to 14 batches that need to be returned. Then I downloaded a bunch of Argentina Census records by mistake and just return them for someone else to do.

So things are not going that well for me. I thought maybe I'm cursed because I don't want to work on the Cheshire projects. I downloaded one of the batches and my brain just doesn't want to comprehend what I need to do with this project. I decided to return that batch for someone else to do too. It's almost 10:30pm and I am tired out from all this. My decision is to stop fooling around with indexing since I just might make a mess of things if I keep up at my current rate. So I am throwing in the towel for the night and if I have chance I will try again later in the week.